"drlazer19" wrote:
Tried oculus rift dev kit for first time yesterday and must say its quite the expereince. I was told it would cover your field of view which it did not. 1 inch black borders on all sides make me feel like i am wearing goggles. wider field of view would make it that much more immersive even without high end resolution.
Will the consumer product cover our peripherals completely? Thats what im most worried about...
In the Rift DK, the main limiting factor to FoV is that the lens borders define the edges of what you can see when you rotate your eyes. In a future Rift model, the FoV could be improved by using larger lenses, with a portion removed to fit closer to the nose and eyebrow ridge, getting the lens center where it belongs. Using the A lenses, with your eyelashes brushing them, maximizes your FoV (so much that looking to the outer edges requires rotating your eyes to the point where they actually hurt a little, at least in my case). In my experience, using the C lenses discards about half the pixels (and significant FoV).
"Completely" is unlikely, considered that each eye can see about 180-degrees (when looking outward to avoid nose occlusion), and combined peripheral vision (including eye rotation) is about 270-degrees. Palmer did play with a 270-degree HMD in his pre-Rift days, but that would be impractical in a stylish consumer Rift device using modern affordable technology.
However, there is still some room for improvement in a consumer Rift model, especially in the inner edges (i.e. more stereoscopic overlap with less occlusion by a center divider, which can be achieved with lens offset and matching tangential lens distortion correction).
